How to double or triple your development without a growth manager 

Congratulations, your startup has become a series A. After months of hard work, it is time to take a breath. Uh not quite… Investors want to know how exactly you are going to reach the goals that you have written on your business plan.

You have grown with marketing tactics and an incredible job done by your sales reps. Now, you need a solid plan to double or triple your growth for next year. We aren’t talking about short-term tactics anymore.

You have two choices: do it yourself or hire a growth manager. If you want to try it yourself, this article explains concretely how to put a growth strategy into place that will bring you results in just three months.

The best quality in a seller is empathy. The best quality in a UX Designer is empathy. The best quality in a client support is empathy. So why wouldn’t the best quality in a growth manager be empathy? The only way to be empathetic is by listening to others. Listen in order to analyse the business from all angles. To understand the context:

Context + Clear Ideas = Winning Growth Strategy 

It is necessary to take a step back if you have worked in the startup since its creation because you could start with distorted preconceptions.

A large notebook will help you make observations such as ideas for acquisition channels, tools that weren’t used implemented correctly, not optimal sales scripts, tensions between members of the team, informal processes, etc.

1. Talk about your new mission

Communication with others helps clarify goals and missions that surround your role and that of your team. Communicating since day one allows you to avoid ego wars and fear of other departments by creating healthy foundations in inter-department relationships.

2. Collect qualitative data

“Get out of the building!” Steve Blank

Standardising knowledge of the business to the clients is one of the key points in this audit. It will help the marketing team, the product team, and your sales reps.

In the case of a SaaS B2B, spend as much time as you can with sales reps and client support. It is important to instil what you already know about your clients and leads.

After having collected internal qualitative data, it is time to look externally. You can interview clients in order to understand their motivations and frictions. You can create their personas.

For what “job” does a client “hire” your product? Once you know, your marketing campaigns will have a much larger impact.

The origin of the word audit comes from ancient Rome. Audit comes from the Latin word audire, which means “to listen to.” The Romans used this term to designate an inspection in the name of the emperor for ruling the provinces. This inspector came to verify the accounts of each citizen of a province. Their role was to “listen” to each of the numbers that were said to him. It could be many weeks before they found something. And they always found something. 

Just like a Roman inspector, you must understand numbers to be able to represent your business well, in the context that it evolved, and in the most successful sales channels.

My growth audits are composed of 8 parts:

1. Business 
2. Funnel AARRR
3. Qualitative research
4. Analytics
5. Market stack 
6. Market
7. Competitive analysis/benchmark
8. Management

1. Business 

You launched your startup a couple of years ago. Now the goal is to do a “check-up” of its current “health.” By health I mean how has the revenue and profits evolved.

Questions to ask yourself:

• How much has the revenue increased each month since you launched the product?
• How many clients have you acquired each month since you launched the product?
• What is the net margin rate?
• What are the current top 3 channels of growth and of acquisition?
• Is the pricing understandable or pertinent? Could you double the prices?

2. Funnel AARRR

I split the way I use the framework of Dave McClure into two phases:

1. Understand the different tactics tried on each part of the AARRR
2. Analyse the global conversion rate to find the high impact area of the business

1. For each part of the AARRR:

• What are the current tactics?
• What are the metrics followed?
• What are the 3 channels that perform the best today?
• What have we tried in the past and what were the results?

2. Analyse the global conversion rate

• Where are we losing our leads/clients? Why?
• What is the impact on the business?

Conversion rate for each step according to the AARRR framework

• 57% of users that visit the home page will not visit the product page. Why?
• There is a large difference between “looked at a product page” and “put in the cart.” Why?

3. Qualitative research

This part is often skipped because it is annoying and long. We feel like we are losing time by doing it. That isn’t true. It is through clients and sales reps that we can find the best growth ideas.

While interviewing the top 20% of a startup’s clients, I realised that they all arrived through the same acquisition channel: a marketplace of prestashop plugins.

Your clients have a goldmine of ideas

Knowing that what needed to be done was done during the Meetings and Gatherings stage, you will just need to add your finds to the document.

4. Analytics

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” Peter Drucker

The capacity to measure the growth experiences is the only way to understand their impact on the generated revenue. If you can’t measure the results, you can throw out your tests. You don’t just create growth; because without results, you will learn nothing. Growth is quickly understanding what works and what doesn’t work and doubling the success rate.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Which analytics tools are we currently using?
• Are they implemented correctly?
• Are there signs of incoherence in the gathered data?
• What are the metrics followed? Are they pertinent?

5. Marketing stack

Having already put into use several marketing tactics, you already have some tools in place. You should understand what is implemented, in what manner, and for what reason.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• What marketing tools are we currently using?
• Are they implemented correctly?
• Are they really necessary for our stage?

6. Market

More so than the data of your business, an important step is creating a system of actors on the market.

1. Create the ecosystem of your sector

Visualising an ecosystem allows you to find partnership opportunities

2. Design a map of client experience

A second way to do this is by creating a customer/user journey. A customer journey is the path of your users and the interactions with your different touchpoints, before and after using your service.

You want to understand what other products your clients use during their journey to accomplish their task. This allows you to develop an extensive spectrum of the possibilities of partnerships

To accomplish their “job” (to eat), a client passes through around 20 steps. In this case, we will be interested in going and contacting the startups that are also a part of these steps in order to collaborate with our service. 

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Who are the actors in the ecosystem?
• Who are the actors in the customer journey of a client?
• What are the opportunities that make sense for us today? In 6 months? In one year?
• What are the best practises in the industry?

7. Analyse the competition

Pretend you are back in school. Yes, that is exactly what we asked ourselves to do during the group project. Except now you are alone, and you have to go deeper; we are going to delve into the part of marketing, design, and branding.

For the marketing part I use SimilarWeb to analyse the data of the competition’s traffic. I then use Spyfu and Ahrefs in order to understand their main sources of traffic.

Below (table 1) the competition has strategies focused on SEO, why?

Table 1: Organic vs. Paid Acquisition of the competition

Table 2: we realise that our two biggest competitors have invested in Facebook and YouTube. What are they doing on these social media platforms? Why?

Common strategy of the two largest competitors

Surprising!

Table 2: traffic of the competitors through social media

For the branding and UX part, I surf websites, note the different value propositions and positioning of others. In addition, I screenshot pages that have a lot of extra value added.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• What makes us different from the other actors on the market?
• Which acquisition channels work well for them? Partnerships? Content? Social media?
• Do they buy specific keywords?
• What talents do their marketing teams have?

8. Management 

In each business, there are real processes and bottlenecks. The faster that you understand, the better you can prioritise your ideas for growth experience (more about this in the second part of the article).

You must also understand the culture in order to adapt your strategy.

Let me explain. If you have an aggressive culture like Booking.com, you won’t have the same process as Buffer, a business that has a culture centred around client satisfaction. Booking is going to maximise their conversion rate in any way possible and Buffer is going to maximise their churn rate. They don’t do business the same way, their tactic ideas will, therefore, be very different.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• What are the processes (formal and informal)?
• What is the culture?
• How are the resources allotted for the projects?
• What is your marketing budget? Growth budget?

Once you have understood the context in which a startup evolves, a plan of action can start to be rolled out. This is why the best CMOs and growth managers take the time to do an audit. They don’t simply implement their ideas directly.